Kate Boy

Stockholm's sleek yet edgy electro-pop outfit Kate Boy features singer/songwriter Kate Akhurst and producer Markus Dextegen. Originally from Australia, Akhurst began her songwriting career while still in her teens and ended up in Los Angeles in the early 2010s, writing tunes for High School Musical's Ashley Tisdale and Glee's Charice, among other clients. After moving to Sweden, she met Dextegen, who was one-third of the production team Rocket Boy (the other two-thirds, Oskar Sikow Engström and Hampus Nordgren Hemlin, were also onetime members of Akhurst and Dextegen's project). Dubbing themselves Kate Boy as an expression of the project's androgynous persona and their egalitarian creative process, Akhurst and Dextegen's first single "Northern Lights" -- a fittingly frosty piece of tweaked synth pop -- arrived in 2013 via IAMSOUND Records. Several other singles appeared over the next couple of years, including the 2014 Fiction Records debut "Self Control." Fiction also issued Kate Boy's first full-length, One, in 2015; The Remix EP, which featured reworkings of the album's songs by Planningtorock, Clarence Clarity, Christian Rich, and La Fleur, was released at the end of that year. ~ Heather Phares